Must every tragic mass shooting bring out the shrill ignorance of "gun control" advocates?

The key fallacy of so-called gun control laws is that such laws do not in fact control guns. They simply disarm law-abiding citizens, while people bent on violence find firearms readily available.

If gun control zealots had any respect for facts, they would have discovered this long ago, because there have been too many factual studies over the years to leave any serious doubt about gun control laws being not merely futile but counterproductive.

Places and times with the strongest gun control laws have often been places and times with high murder rates. Washington, D.C., is a classic example, but just one among many.

When it comes to the rate of gun ownership, that is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, hand gun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.

The few counter-examples offered by gun control zealots do not stand up under scrutiny. Perhaps their strongest talking point is that Britain has stronger gun control laws than the United States and lower murder rates.

But, if you look back through history, you will find that Britain has had a lower murder rate than the United States for more than two centuries and, for most of that time, the British had no more stringent gun control laws than the United States. Indeed, neither country had stringent gun control for most of that time.

Your error, Dr. Sowell, is to rely solely on facts, which are useless.

How do you feel about gun control? That's the key question.

Also, since you can't actually stop people from doing something as terrible as shooting up the Newtown school, you need to control guns so you can feel like you're doing something to help. Just telling yourself that evil happens isn't good enough.

And don't start with your suggestions about arming school staff. We all know where that would lead, don't we.

More Guns, Less Crime is a book by John Lott that says violent crime rates go down when states pass “shall issue” concealed carry laws. He presents the results of his statistical analysis of crime data for every county in the United States during 29 years from 1977 to 2005. The book examines city, county and state level data from the entire United States and measures the impact of 11 different types of gun control laws on crime rates. The book expands on an earlier study published in 1997 by Lott and his co-author David Mustard in The Journal of Legal Studies.[1] Lott also examines the effects of gun control laws, including the Brady Law.

I have a brain freeze right now and can’t remember the prof’s name but there was one at Emory University who published a scientific study based on gun ownership back in the 1700’s or maybe it was 1800’s.

He was caught simply making up facts and had to recant his remarks and I think may have even lost his job.

Fat Ed is on the radio claiming assault guns will be confiscated. Well I would like to nominate drunk ed as the chief confiscator assigned to taking them from the biker gangs, crips & bloods and other notorious gangs across this great land who won't even laugh at him as they carve their initials across his large @ss.Maybe then he will under stand why citizens want them. These people and more like them will be coming for our wives and daughters, our food stocks and water if the dollar collapses.

The book was “Arming America.” The author was Michael A. Bellesiles. His Bancroft Prize was rescinded and “resigned” his professorship at Emory.

From wikipedia (yeah, I know):

In two scholarly articles,[15][16] law professor James Lindgren of Northwestern University noted that in Arming America, Bellesiles had

purported to count guns in about a hundred wills from 17th- and 18th-century Providence, Rhode Island, but these did not exist because the decedents had died intestate (i.e., without wills);
purported to count nineteenth-century San Francisco County probate inventories, but these had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire;
reported a national mean for gun ownership in 18th-century probate inventories that was mathematically impossible;
misreported the condition of guns described in probate records in a way that accommodated his thesis;
miscited the counts of guns in nineteenth-century Massachusetts censuses and militia reports,
had more than a 60% error rate in finding guns listed as part of estates in Vermont records; and
had a 100% error rate in the cited gun-related homicide cases of seventeenth-century Plymouth, MA.

Critics also identified problems with Bellesiles’s methods of citation. Cramer noted that Bellesiles had misrepresented a passage by George Washington about the quality of three poorly prepared militia units as if his criticism applied to the militia in general. (Washington had noted that the three units were exceptions to the rule.)[17] Cramer wrote, “It took me twelve hours of hunting before I found a citation that was completely correct. In the intervening two years, I have spent thousands of hours chasing down Bellesiless citations, and I have found many hundreds of shockingly gross falsifications.”[4]

“Michael A. Bellesiles teaches history at Central Connecticut State University. The author of numerous books, including 1877: America’s Year of Living Violently, he lives in Connecticut.”

Good points. And if we have learned anything in the Climate Change/Global Warming debate, feelings are all that matter. So heading into the next Ice Age, we are getting rid of our ability to cheaply generate heat. Why ? Because some idiots want to feel good before they freeze to death. Now we are looking into getting rid of guns, just before the Iranians let loose all their sleeper cells. Why ? Because some idiots want to feel good before they are shot down in a mall by an Islamic terrorist.

Let enough innocent people get shot up by a lunatic and facts, logic, liberty, the Constitution - none of it will matter to most Americans. After the last election I’m convinced of this. IMO most Americans don’t really want liberty- they want someone (usually the government) to say the problem is fixed so they can get back to watching TV.

I have a brain freeze right now and cant remember the profs name but there was one at Emory University who published a scientific study based on gun ownership back in the 1700s or maybe it was 1800s.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 (UPI) -- Emory University has accepted the resignation of a history professor whose work on the use and ownership of firearms in early America has been widely criticized.

Emory Associate Vice President Jan Gleason announced Friday that Michael Bellesiles' resignation would be effective Dec. 31. Bellesiles is the author of "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture," an award-winning book that appeared to confirm that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right to bear arms and that individual gun rights were unimportant to America's founders.

However, Emory released a 40-page indictment of Bellesiles' research composed by a committee of three historians as well as Bellesiles' 7-page response in which he denied any wrongdoing.

The basic thesis of "Arming America" is there were very few guns in early America and that most of the guns that did exist were old and broken. Bellesiles published an article on the subject in 1996 in the Journal of American History -- a piece that was named "Best Article of the Year" by the Organization of American Historians. The book won the 2001 Bancroft Prize, the most-prestigious prize in American-history writing. Columbia is investigating the possibility of revoking the prize.

But over the past year, critics of "Arming America" claimed that Bellesiles miscounted, misinterpreted and made up substantial portions of the information in the book.

The critics said Bellesiles' work focused on nonexistent probate records that he said he read in San Francisco and in Providence, R.I. However, the San Francisco records were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, and many of the Providence documents that Bellesiles says he read apparently never existed. Bellesiles has also said that his research notes were destroyed in a flood in his campus office, a story that people at Emory familiar with the flood have cast doubt on.

After questions were raised in the media and in faculty workshops at Columbia, Yale, and other major universities, Emory's dean, Robert A. Paul, convened a panel of historians to investigate the charges. The committee was led by Stanley N. Katz of Princeton and included Hanna H. Gray, a former president of the University of Chicago; and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard.

The committee's investigation focused on Bellesiles' use of probate records. Of particular interest was a key table on which the author's thesis is grounded. The committee's report stated: "Evaluating Table One is an exercise in frustration because it is almost impossible to tell where Bellesiles got his information. His source note lists the names of 40 counties, but supplies no indication of the exact records used or their distribution over time. After reviewing his skimpy documentation, we had the same question as (one reviewer) Gloria Main: 'Did no editors or referees ever ask that he supply this basic information?' ... The best that can be said about his work with the probate and militia records is that he is guilty of unprofessional and misleading work."

The committee also agreed with James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern University, that the scandal could have been avoided with "more conventional editing" by The Journal of American History, and with Ohio State historian Randolph Roth, who determined that Bellesiles' numbers were "mathematically improbable or impossible."

Additionally, the committee found that "no one has been able to replicate Bellesiles' results (on the low percentage of guns) for the places or dates he lists"; that he conflated wills and inventories, which "greatly reduced the (reported) percentage of guns in estates"; he took a "casual approach" to gathering data; "(raised) doubts about his veracity" in claiming to have worked with records in California; and raised questions about his use of microfilm at the National Archives Record Center in East Point, Ga.

Committee members also called implausible Bellesiles' claim that false data on his Web site was put there by a hacker and his disavowal of e-mail messages that he wrote to researchers, giving the wrong location for almost all of his probate research.

In a statement, Bellesiles said: "All that remains in question are the few paragraphs and table on probate materials. On those paragraphs, Emory's committee of inquiry found no evidence of fabrication, though they do not charge evasion."

"I have never fabricated evidence of any kind nor knowingly evaded my responsibilities as a scholar," he wrote. "I have never consciously misrepresented any data or evidence. ... I will continue to research and report on the probate materials while also working on my next book, but cannot continue to teach in what I feel is a hostile environment."

Regards, GtG

30
posted on 12/17/2012 1:33:47 PM PST
by Gandalf_The_Gray
(I live in my own little world, I like it 'cuz they know me here.)

I have a brain freeze right now and cant remember the profs name but there was one at Emory University who published a scientific study based on gun ownership back in the 1700s or maybe it was 1800s.

He was caught simply making up facts and had to recant his remarks and I think may have even lost his job.

Could that have been Michael Bellisles? His Arming America "study" was a sick joke and I seem to recall him resigning/being fired over it.

I believe the discredited professor you are thinking of was Michael A. Bellesiles...

Yes, that was the fraudster. His figures were almost wholly gundecked -- and no doubt he felt that gundecking his data was A-OK for the reason that FRiend ArGee pointed out above: He felt that what he was doing was for the good, and therefore all right, and that he had a positive duty as a liberal to help people come into the safe harbor of liberal fantasy so they could feel virtuous and safe and righteous and smug.

Your error, Dr. Sowell, is to rely solely on facts, which are useless.

How do you feel about gun control? That's the key question.

I was listening to NPR on the drive home from work yesterday and they had some liberal college professor talking about gun control. This professor freely admitted that the previous assault weapon ban had no measurable impact on crime whatsoever but that we needed one anyways because assault weapons "scare our national psyche" and "we'd feel better" if they were banned.

This professor freely admitted that the previous assault weapon ban had no measurable impact on crime whatsoever but that we needed one anyways because assault weapons "scare our national psyche" and "we'd feel better" if they were banned.

I wonder why people think we need a machine-generated Matrix to enslave us and turn us into nothing more than power sources for others.

It seems we want to turn ourselves into that, and we're not too particular about who or what those others are.

In the end, we all seem to be Cyphers. "Why, oh why, didn't I take the blue pill?"

At this point, global murder rates are more than anything racially linked. Look at a global map thereof, and you will see all majority black or Hispanic countries have a high rate, Asian and Northern European countries a low one.

Look more specifically within mixed countries such as the US, and our black and Hispanic figures mirror those of black and Hispanic-majority countries, and Asian and European, the same.

The very same correlation tends to hold for those global tests of academic proficiency.

You did have the DC snipers, but the female answer I would guess is pretty straightforward: lower testosterone, lower levels of relevant drug treatment, plus a lower incidence of the typical forms of mental illness involved.

We are still a majority white country, so I’d think a majority white expectation might be expected. But I think above average intelligence seems to go with the profile for this sort of premeditated thing. We’re dealing with still quite low numbers for statistical averages overall, but just with one such shooter, I doubt that Asians would be or are underrepresented even though Asian men on average have a slightly lower average testosterone level.

Anyone know which study Sowell references, conducted by a university professor who was subsequenly discredited?

I spend a few minutes, and was unable to find an actual copy of the study, but two things are noteworthy... First, the offending study seems to have been erased from academic memory.Secondly, The rumor is that the disgraced "Professor," an emergency room MD, subsequently resigned from the university.

Anyone know which study Sowell references, conducted by a university professor who was subsequenly discredited?

I spend a few minutes, and was unable to find an actual copy of the study, but two things are noteworthy... First, the offending study seems to have been erased from academic memory.Secondly, The rumor is that the disgraced "Professor," an emergency room MD, subsequently resigned from the university.

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